Cloud & Infrastructure Topics
Cloud platform services, infrastructure architecture, Infrastructure as Code, environment provisioning, and infrastructure operations. Covers cloud service selection, infrastructure provisioning patterns, container orchestration (Kubernetes), multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, infrastructure cost optimization, and cloud platform operations. For CI/CD pipeline and deployment automation, see DevOps & Release Engineering. For cloud security implementation, see Security Engineering & Operations. For data infrastructure design, see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure.
Scalability and Systems Resource Management
Design and operational practices for managing compute and platform resources as systems scale. Covers autoscaling, resource pooling, orchestration, cost trade offs between always on versus on demand provisioning, and architectural choices that affect resource utilization and performance. Candidates should be prepared to discuss capacity planning for infrastructure, metrics and alerts for autoscaling, and cost versus performance decisions for high availability systems.
Advanced Compute Strategy and Optimization
Covers evaluation and optimization of compute infrastructure choices and configurations. Topics include selecting between virtual machines, containers and managed container services, and serverless function platforms; sizing and instance type decisions; cost models including reserved and spot pricing versus on demand; scaling behaviors and auto scaling configuration; cold start and latency trade offs for serverless; hybrid and multi model architectures and when to combine compute models; performance tuning, resource isolation and placement, monitoring and observability for compute resources, and strategies for cost optimization and reliability at scale.